Marine heatwaves create coral winners and losers

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-10-09 10:01

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Image by Dominique clain from Pixabay

The 2016 marine heatwave which hit reefs around Australia created coral bleaching winners and losers, and just measuring the total coral cover alone means we may be failing to see the very different responses across different coral species, according to Australian research. The researchers looked at the make up of coral communities at sites on the Ningaloo Reef, the Northwest Shelf, the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea, before and after the 2016 heatwave. They found that different types of coral had vastly different responses to the heatwave, with some being clear 'winners' while others were clear 'losers'. The make-up of the reef sites before the heatwave largely dictated how communities changed following the heatwave, whereas the magnitude of thermal stress was the main driver of total coral cover change, the authors say.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Coral responses to a catastrophic marine heatwave are decoupled from changes in total coral cover at a continental scale

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Our study investigated changes in coral community composition in response to the 2016 marine heatwave around tropical Australia. We identified potential winners and losers of climate-driven coral bleaching, showing that the pre-heatwave community composition was the primary driver of coral responses to heat stress.

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Research The Royal Society, Web page Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends).

Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The University of Adelaide, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), University of Tasmania

Funder: Funding and support for RLS field surveys were provided by the Ian Potter Foundation and Parks Australia. RLS data management is supported by Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS). IMOS is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). It is operated by a consortium of institutions as an unincorporated joint venture, with the University of Tasmania as the lead agent. The analyses were supported by the Marine Biodiversity Hub through funding from the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program and by the Australian Research Council (R.D.S.-S. by ARC FT190100599 and C.M. by FT200100870).

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